This week in Southern California, the lifeguards absolutely kicked ass.
I saw multiple serious incidents where they clearly saved someone’s life. Their skill and courage are easy to take for granted until you see them in action.
Tip of the cap to all of you.
Every year, I share this video of French caretakers who take sand from Omaha Beach in Normandy, and scrub them into the letters to give them the gold coloring.
They do this for all 9,386 US soldiers who died.
France also gave us this land as American soil. #MemorialDayWeekend
The best advice I always give to newly exited founders:
Open a Vanguard account.
Not Fidelity. Not Schwab.
Vanguard.
'Smart advice,' You might think. 'They do have the lowest fees..'
Wrong.
Their interface is so awful, you will never trade..
Has made my clients millions.
Jeff Bezos said the bottom half of Americans should pay zero federal income tax.
He cited a nurse in Queens making ~$75K and paying ~$12K in taxes saying “we shouldn’t be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington.”
@Scaramucci this is awesome! I also remember bumping into you at the Harvard Club maybe a decade back when visiting NYC. Is the club still on your rotation?
I was an uptight 32-year-old who'd just left Goldman.
Barely any money when I started my own business.
So naturally my pompous little ass joined the Harvard Club — I wanted people to know I went to Harvard.
Four years of breakfast meetings, prospect after prospect.
Meanwhile Joaquin is busing my table every morning.
We'd chat often and I tipped well.
One day he comes over and says — Mr. Anthony, you manage money, right? We've had a personal injury situation.
My family just came into $35 million. You've always been kind to me.
Would you manage it?
The guy busing my table had a higher net worth than I did.
Be good to people. All of it comes back around.
Certainly fascinating, but one thing stood out to me. The idea that an early stage company should just automatically respond to customer requests by using AI to add features to the product is a recipe for disaster IMO. The end result will be Frankenstein code bases that don't really satisfy anyone. Startups succeed when they have a clear vision that is influenced by customer feedback. Keep the roadmap - use AI to execute on it faster and to understand customer needs and feedback better. Don't delegate such a key aspect of what makes startups great to AI.
Sure you can earn a billion dollars. I've been teaching people how to do it for 20 years. The way you do it is to start a company that grows fast. You don't have to do anything bad to make a company grow fast. You just have to make something people want.
https://t.co/zXWErQqlwV
Mark Zuckerberg engineered a custom hardware device for his wife in 2019. No clock face. One faint light. A one-hour window.
Priscilla had a specific problem. She'd wake up in the middle of the night, check her phone for the time, and the number itself spiked her anxiety. 4am meant worry about the kids waking soon. 5:30 meant calculating whether to just get up. The information was the trigger.
Most engineers approach "can't sleep" by adding things to the bedroom. A meditation app. A Hatch alarm. A weighted blanket. A sleep coach.
Mark removed the variable that was running the wake-up loop.
The Sleep Box sits on Priscilla's nightstand and shows nothing for 23 hours a day. Between 6am and 7am it emits a single faint light. Faint enough not to wake her if she's still asleep. Visible enough that if she's already up, she knows it's okay to start the day. The rest of the night, dark. No clock. No time display. If she wakes at 3am she has no data to push her cortisol up with, so she goes back to sleep.
He wrote the firmware and built the enclosure himself. No team, no procurement, no Meta resources. He posted the result on Instagram and said it worked better than he expected.
The design move most CEOs would never run is the personal one. The instinct is to outsource a family problem to a specialist. A sleep coach. A doctor. A consumer electronics startup with a Series B and a marketing budget.
Mark intervened at a specific link in the chain. Time data hitting Priscilla's brain at 3am was what broke sleep. The phone got moved off the nightstand and replaced with a box that physically cannot deliver that data.
The box has no clock. That's the entire product.
Ken Griffin is self-made. He built his businesses largely outside NYC but is now growing it in NYC. With Ken comes construction of an office tower, high paying jobs, tax revenue and a remarkable commitment to local philanthropy. Not sure why that pisses off the new mayor.